


The Wind Whispers

by MarkoftheAsphodel



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu | Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War
Genre: Gen, I'm sure y'all already know what other warning tags are involved if you're reading fe4 fic, Lewyn being Lewyn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-27
Updated: 2016-06-27
Packaged: 2018-07-18 12:42:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7315648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarkoftheAsphodel/pseuds/MarkoftheAsphodel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lewyn, on the edge of a triumph in Thracia, takes stock of his unusual... gifts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wind Whispers

He couldn’t fly. He didn’t have the shaman’s gift of warping himself around Jugdral with a thought. He’d been given something else to live with and Lewyn found it a source of petty pleasure more often than it was useful.

“What is it, Oifaye?” 

He asked it without even a backward glance; Lewyn knew Oifaye’s approach not just from his heavy steps but from the crackling sound in the other man’s knees.

“I wished to apologize for the doubts I voiced earlier.”

Lewyn shrugged, still without looking in Oifaye’s direction. 

“You coddled Seliph past the time when he should stand on his own,” he responded to the former boy-wonder of a tactician. “Fortunately for all of us, he’s starting to ask the right questions.” 

He heard the shift in Oifaye’s breathing that let him know the other man’s thoughts were racing to the defense of Sigurd’s misty, haloed figure. Lewyn didn’t have to do any more than hint at old failures to get that reaction out of Oifaye; there was still some glimmer of an overeager teenager inside of the man. Maybe in ten or fifteen years Oifaye would enjoy the genuine serenity of General Hannibal, whose pulse never quickened over any mere exchange of words. 

Of course, by then his knees would be completely wrecked. 

No, Lewyn didn’t have Claude’s ability to glimpse the future in its horrors. He couldn't foresee and he couldn’t read minds. But an invisible world was known to him and him alone, and if he got some grim amusement out of it while working for the common good, why not enjoy it? 

-x-

Of course he was a better tactician than Oifaye could be with only maps and cleverness at his disposal. He could hear distant hooves and the wing-beats of a Thracian squadron beyond the horizon. He could interpret the emotional state of every last member of his army just by listening. Lewyn knew which ones were distracted by lust and which ones were seething in anger behind well-bred smiles. He knew who was hiding their wounds out of useless bravado and who’d drunk enough in the night to have their innards twist in the morning. All in all, he was lucky not to have bonded with a deity that blessed him with preternatural sense of smell, but Forseti carried only sound to him on the ceaseless winds that carried them through Thracia towards victory.

He knew the silly secrets of the young Crusaders in his care and he knew the weaknesses of his fellow survivors, the things that could make them greater liabilities than the silliest child soldier. Shanan had been favoring his left foot since they’d encountered that trio of Blume’s henchwomen near Conote. Finn was using that immaculate blue coat and white gloves to conceal twenty years of damage to a human body pushed past its limits in this war of demi-gods.  


Seliph, bless him, was beginning to notice things. “Shanan looks tired,” he would say after another day beneath the pitiless Thracian sun, or he’d worry aloud over the welfare of soldiers without holy blood. He hadn’t picked up yet on Oifaye’s distress at being replaced as Seliph’s tactical advisor— or, Lewyn thought, Seliph had but was at a loss over what to do about it. If Seliph didn’t truly hear the wind whispering its secrets, he at least sensed the wind’s touch on his face even when every leaf on the stunted Thracian trees was still.

“Are you feeling hopeful, Lewyn?”

“More than hopeful,” he said to Julia, who was looking up at him with oddly familiar eyes. 

“It reassures me whenever I see you smile,” she said, through a small and sweet smile of her own, but Lewyn wasn’t listening to her voice alone. He was attuned to the other sound he’d been picking up from Julia lately, the sound of a second heartbeat, faint and impossibly fast.

Seliph. Bless him. What a perfect student he was.

“I have no doubt in our victory here in Thracia” said Lewyn, speaking over the steady pulse of Julia’s child.

Julia closed her eyes and her smile grew brighter. Lewyn had seen that look before, somewhere, but the exact memory eluded him. Was it Fury’s specter haunting him now?

He patted Julia on the head and walked swiftly away, headed outdoors where he might listen to the wind unfiltered and decipher its secrets.

**Author's Note:**

> Seliph/Julia is not something I particularly dig, and I can't see it as anything other than a set-up for major trouble down the road. But Lewyn sure seems to be shipping them come Chapter 10, and I figure he thought that was *supposed* to be the way things worked out. :/


End file.
